One millennial's experiments in chasing great recipes, travel and life.

Cookie catastrophe: chocolate chip cookies

August 29, 2015

Lots of blogs are full of delicious amazing recipes. Hopefully, some of mine are joining those ranks. But let’s keep it in perspective, folks: not every recipe is a success. Sometimes it’s the recipe, sometimes its the chef. Everybody has those meals and those days, but they’re rarely shared publicly. Today, I’m going to share one such mishap. It wasn’t a full out disaster, but it didn’t quite work either.

The scene: Logan’s birthday. After a delicious lunch at Dame’s, Logan wanted homemade chocolate chip cookies as his birthday dessert. I’ve got a go-to chocolate chip recipe, but there’s a been a recipe floating around Pinterest lately for the best chocolate chip cookies ever according to the New York Times. Who am I to deprive Logan of the best chocolate chip cookies ever? On his birthday no less? So I decided to see how it held up to the hype.

AND IT WAS A HOT MESS, Y’ALL.

The cookies hardly rose, and didn’t really change shape when I cooked them. The first two trays I made the mistake of shaping the dough into cookies, and they came out looking like tiny spheres. Then, when I made them bigger and flattened them before they went into the over, they still didn’t rise. But the bigger issue was that they didn’t brown. You know that glorious golden brown color of the perfect chocolate chip cookie? Mine were nowhere near that. They were pale vampire cookies. Again, the first batch I left in until they were just slightly golden on top, and they overcooked! My poor sad anemic-looking cookies.

My weird looking cookies. Various trays, various attempts to bake them better, no real quality results.

Let me be the first to say that I must have done something wrong. Clearly if enough people liked it for the New York Times to call it the best and for so many bloggers to throw it around Pinterest. So someone please tell me in the comments what I did wrong. 🙂

That being said, they still tasted good. This one has a higher salt content than other cookie recipes I’ve made, but both Logan and I noticed and enjoyed it. I think I’ll stick to my recipe, but add some tweaks from this one!

Sifting the dry ingredients.

Beat your butter, then add the brown sugar. Beat it together for several minutes.

Sugar and butter: the basis of any good baking recipe.

Add in the vanilla and egg – that’s all your wet ingredients!

Ingredients, waiting to be mixed.

Add in your dry ingredients, maybe in two batches.

Be careful to not overmix the flour!

Finished dough, ready to chill!

First tray: made the mistake of shaping into balls. Don’t do this.

Result of the balled up dough: balls of cookies. Too small, and too spherical.

Probably the best looking tray from the batch. Decent looking, but pale.

Why are they so pale? Help!

So there it is.

I have two guesses where I went wrong:

let the butter get too soft. I put it on the counter all afternoon, to the point that it was room temperature when I used it. It meant that beating it looked slightly different, but it tasted and looked normal when we got to the actual dough phase.

The recipe called for putting it in the fridge for 24-48 hours. Because I didn’t plan that far in advance, I just threw it in the freezer for 90 minutes, then let it sit on the counter for 15 before I divided it onto cookie sheets. I know for lots of cookie recipes, the dough needs to be chilled so the butter works properly in the oven, so maybe my shortcut hurt me?

If I had to guess, I think it’s the former. Having the wrong initial consistency of butter would throw the whole thing off, right? Even if it tasted right as dough, that may make it not bake properly? Someone help me out, please.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. I didn’t make it up, it’s the one that the New York Times thinks is one of the best. I added some tweaks, of course.